The challenge, of course, is that people forget the answers to those questions, and also a motivated fraudster can go ahead and find the answer in many cases through different methods. And you do actually see that in some cases, you get organisations like Equifax, that can go a little bit deeper, they can do what's called dynamic knowledge based authentication and maybe they can look at your bank statements and ask you have you done a transaction for this amount on a certain day? Or how much do you pay against your mortgage each month, etc. and that's a little bit better.

But ultimately, people often don't get those questions right, especially when it's on the spot.

So the approach we took was to say, what is something that you should know, that you should always know you'll never forget, that we can present to you that isn't just memorable, but it's also frictionless or very easy, and in some cases, enjoyable for you to do. And we took this concept of, okay, if you live at a certain place, or you know, a certain area, then why don't we go ahead and grab different images from that area. And we're talking Google Street View images, in many cases, these are images that aren't easily searchable, you'd have to walk around and try and get to know a place if you're going to do it yourself.

And then the credit scoring engine started taking shape. And over, you know, Covid, after Covid, we started bringing defaults down from 50 to 40, 40 to 30, 30 to 20, 20 to 15. And then, you know, the tougher bit came because it was not only about the credit scoring, it had to be a lot of engineering, then it's about the experience of the consumer, how is the product structured, you know, the first interaction of the consumer with the company till after he or she has repaid, everything matters. How the lead generation happened, how is the customer support interacting with the customer, or what has been experienced in app, what is experienced at the point of repayment, you know.

We've seen many times if the customer faces challenges in repaying whether or not it was our issue or an issue at the wallet side, the customers could turn rogue.

There was so much to it that we learned over time. And you know, when we actually closed our lending book pre-acquisition, the latest cohort actually close it under three per cent default

As we grow Smarter Loans, both Raf and I we're also learning about the lending industry and understanding that there's a lot more to it than just personal unsecured loans, than just unsecured business loans. So we started developing relationships, and then that got turned into motorsports and farming and equipment financing and buses and coaches. And today we have people financing aeroplanes and aviation. So it all grew over time.

And now if you look at it, yes, that's how we're able to say 60 lenders because they represent different verticals, you know, they're not all in like personal, unsecured loans, they represent a spectrum of different types of products and services.

When you have a contract like ours, in which you gently transfer the value of the property to the tenant, there is no capital gain or very limited capital gains. So now the yield differentials are stark: why is it that you can get 30 million pounds per billion invested over and over again, in London and 100 in Middlesbrough, compared to 30 over and over again for two human generations?

I don't think those portfolios are worth the same. I don't think ordinary people (if you took the capital gain away) would say, well, I'm quite comfortable getting 100 in Middlesborough and selling that and getting 30 in London, over and over again for two human generations.

Those properties are not the same. The one throwing out 100 million is worth more. It just is. And people look at you blankly and say how can a an apartment in Middlesborough be worth more than you can buy and sell an apartment and Middlesborough? The answer is, well, it's not, the apartment is completely perfectly priced but 10,000 apartments where the rent is commingled and you've broken that asset into two economic units, one which wobbles around and one which is stable, one is a bond and one is equity, and if you separate them out until the equity, it's like, I'm an M&A banker, right? Broken up companies and sold them in pieces. And the two pieces don't add up to the whole, they just don't.

When you then take the rent and tranche it and this is a repeat of the theme, it take a little bit of time to absorb the simplicity of it.

There's over 700 craft breweries in Australia, 700 craft breweries for a population of around 23.5 million. It's massive. We've just had the top 100 independent craft beer votes at the weekend - this is a nationwide competition - and of the top 10, I have two of them on tap at the moment.

So Larry pale ale is one of my favourites and BentSpoke's Crankshaft IPA, but some of them are just becoming crazy. I mean, we've got biscuit ales on, I've got mango sours, I've got raspberry salsas- what you can do with a beer now is just crazy. One of our best sellers which goes very well with the climate here, using all natural produce, is a local brewery, Catchment Brewery up on the mountain. They do it a hot brewed ginger beer, which is a gluten-free, sugar-free and there's a sensational, refreshing bit of lime in there perfect for our balmy, humid summer days.

This weekend, we've got we've got live DJs, Friday and Saturday night. In fact, I take to the next Friday night, I'm a bedroom DJ with a few few beers in my hand - although since I started the bar, I've put about 10 kilos on, we get about five reps a week dropping off samples that they is for us to try, they want us to put on tap, someone's got to drink them...

Entrepreneurship is a profession, a profession that requires close attention to details, and discipline on multiple facets of the business. And if it is justifiable for a person to get an MBA and transition from finance to product management, or transition from product management, to consulting or transition from sales and marketing to something else, then it absolutely is justifiable to get an MBA to mass not to master maybe, but to be a jack of all trades of all of those aspects.

The likelihood of starting a company and being successful is very low already. So arming yourself with education that is tailored specifically for that purpose, that sounds to me like a very good investment.

And I have to say it was it was an immense investment in myself.

And I actually want to take a step back here, if you don't mind, and just make a few remarks about people in Alif overall, about about our efforts in combining technology and education. I don't know if you if you knew this, but the average age of our employees is 25. We have a lot of students, recent graduates. We train them ourselves. So to give an example of specific training, IT skills is an area where we felt that we could contribute to the education system in Tajikistan. So we established Alif Academy in 2017, as a nonprofit where we promote it education. So we provide free programming courses, including special courses for girls, for kids, for Afghan refugees.

So far, we've had more than 2,000 graduates of these courses, and some of them working, at least some of them work in other companies. And hopefully now in the new countries we had, and we have the privilege of being able to attract some of the most bright, kind, noble, energetic individuals throughout all these years, we had more than 50,000 applications to to our vacancies. And we've chosen and retained the very best.

I mean, a lot of it's the same from a credit perspective. You're very much looking at the borrower and their underlying financial situation. So you know, as a lot of customers are in the boating space are directors or have their own businesses, there's a lot of reviewing, you know, financial information, profit and loss accounts and balance sheets and the business's performance, looking at the management team as well and their experience and how the business has performed - just as you would do if you were lending on a truck or a piece of machinery.

The difference then comes more around the use of the asset and obviously the asset itself - where lending to businesses for assets that are income generative or crucial to the operation of the business, a leisure yacht doesn't tend to tick that box.

And so there's a there's a nuance in the in the way that the asset is used in the way it's going to benefit the business. And then also there's the asset itself. So understanding the inherent value of the asset, its depreciation, the impact that that has as well.

And of course, as you mentioned, digital has played a massive role.

You know, back in the day, people were just happy to get credit. Now, people are much smarter, they want things like loyalty, they want things like rewards, it's not just about the access to credit, they've got more choice. So certainly the space have become more competitive. The banks are still not there, but certainly a lot more non bank lenders have come onto the scene, people that are able to service customers quicker, faster, more efficiently than the banks.

And of course, if you look, now you've got products like buy now pay later that attracts specific segments of customers.

If I'm looking like 10 or 20 years back, when we were basically as a FinTech organisation the majority of our decisions were relying on the application form. So credit application form. And nowadays, it's leaning to the direction where you ask very few questions from customers. So from a UX point of view, from a customer experience point of view, it's much smoother.

And it can be super automatic - meaning by that you're able to work with a very lean organisation to support 10s of 1000s of customers. It all comes down to what kind of data sources you're able to use. So coming back to this credit application, you might have had 50 or 20 questions on a credit application 10 years ago, today, it might be that you are asking just for identification, which in countries like Finland, Sweden, Estonia, it's automatic. So basically, you're using bank IDs to do the automization.

And once the automizationis is done, then you're able to start calling different data banks, credit bureaus, all kinds of third party data banks, bank transaction history that you're also able to get through the same identification method, although it's a different call. But anyway, you are able to get so much information to support your decision making and you're able to automate the size from the beginning until the end, meaning by that in a previous life, when we were making the risk assessment, we were using application scorecards.

So where does Lenuity fit in? Well, financial services and construction are the two most important things to get the UK out of a recession. Construction is building wealth for the economy. It's providing homes. For people, these are really important things, it's providing jobs, this is an incredibly important thing to drive us out in a recession. And what we're doing is enabling them to thrive in the current environment, to sell like they've never been able to sell before. Not even in boom times.

When you if you take a look back at what happened to the car industry, when they started financing their customers, it was just a massive boom for them that they could create better offers, their business became more profitable, that they had a reduction in costs. Now, when you get into house building and construction, this is magnified for bigger reductions in costs, an area of waste that they never even talk about that, you know, they talk about waste on the building site, we're talking about the financial waste of holding costs, we're talking about the difference between completions that take three months, four months and five months coming down to two weeks.

So, in as much as I was a salesman who was always supposed to be pushy at all times, what I needed to also understand what was the problem that I was solving for them, right and try to solve that for them.

Now, wearing this new hat for me as a salesperson, I'd already prepared me for what it was going to look like when I moved to a company like Fair Money. And if you look at all three co founders, we actually were all at Fair Money at the time. And we moved out just to go to this. When I got into Fair Money, and then the COVID era just hits, we basically began to see one new thing, which was that the guys who were doing collections for us at the time, were still doing collections, like it was 2018 - where the customer just needed a call for them to remember to go to make the payments.

They did not need you to help them structure payments, you know, create a payment plan; they did not need you to help them with any educational of any sorts. They were not in any mess whatsoever.

If you have to remember what we talked machine learning AI today is not something that's come around today, right? What has changed today is our ability to store enormous amount of data economically. Number two is the processing speeds we have today. You know, you want a search bar before you type, your third word is already telling you what it should be. So think about it. And there are millions of people doing it at the same time, any second. And the third thing is the speed of transmission of information.

I think those three in combination literally are the most fertile ground to bring AI to life.

And that's what we've essentially done. But be mindful that when you're doing things at that speed, there are things that could happen which go out of your control.

And of course, very often a financial product, or some finances around this will be the consequences of what you're trying to buy or get in your life. And so that's really the approach that we've taken with our algorithm as well, that allows us to predict how much money a customer will earn over the next five years. And we've developed in essence, a platform on progress that allows users to set up financial goals and find personalised paths to either earn safe abode the way to the goals. And basically at ProGrad we use, as I mentioned, our proprietary models that matches users with solutions from different providers that could help them achieve their targets, including side hustles, flexible work saving accounts, credit card, car finance and many more products.

All of this with the idea that a customer never comes to progress looking for a specific product. Unlike other websites, where you come to your website, looking for specific credit card specific alone, we really think this approach will want to educate young people on different financial topics, and then really serve them with the right solution for their problems or for their goal. So customer can come to ProGrad, tell us 'ProGrad, I'm looking for £5,000 to buy a car'. Awesome, how can we help you get this? Yes, car financing is one option but can we maybe have a combination of you earning a bit of money through one of our partners, on top of you saving a bit of money and you borrowing a bit of money? All of this will allow you to find the most optimal way for you to have a solution to your needs.

It really started in analytics when I first joined. And I think for me, as you know, if you want to learn, strong analytics really helps you to make better credit decisions. So we really worked with Experian on scorecards, but we built out a very strong analytics capability in the business. I guess that goes from the data warehouse through to the frontend with dashboarding and all the analytical tools that you use, as well as, like the actual people capability that we bought in.

And it's helped us to understand our loan portfolio performance at a very granular detail and be able to tweak our scorecards very, very, very quickly to respond to to any credit risk portfolios to be seen. And it's helped us from a margin perspective has certainly helped us a lot to grow the business sustainably.

At the end of the day, what happens is that all the companies that were doing peer-to-peer lending, had to stop because the business model was not able to continue in the way the central bank wanted to do it. Fortunately for us, we were able to keep up our business: we already had a really good platform, that today is a loan management platform that we are offering to banks, to startups, financial institutions, to onboard to originate new credit lines, and to administrate manage those loans.

So basically from 2018 to today, and we will continue on this path: developing and selling our loan management system as a software as a service.

And beginning with Prezzta, what we're trying to do here is try to think and trying to innovate and help people. And as we like to say, without a doubt, we help to develop the FinTech industry.

I mean, it's all a matter of perspective. Actually Creditinfo, in relation to the Experian and TransUnion and so on and so forth, is not as large. However, Creditinfo is a very fast growing organisation, and their focus is very much on emerging markets. And that was the piece that was really attractive, you know, the over encompassing idea is Creditinfo's focus is on providing access to finance within the emerging countries.

That was the main driver for me. This call to work with countries, to work in the parts of the world where everything is so dynamic, everything is so fast-moving, you take an action and you see immediately the impact of that one, you roll up your sleeves and you just basically get on with it.

I had to borrow a lot of money from my peers to be able to pay my rent. Which, as you can imagine, was not a very pleasant experience. Because you have to ask, 'can you lend me a little bit of money here, a little bit of money there' and have to remember who you borrow money from.

And I was dreaming of having an application that could solve these kinds of issues for me. And back then Tinder was already popular among kids, if it can say so. But there was no Tinder-like application to just match with people for the sake of borrowing money from them. I ended up building it myself after not finding it available.

It's been four years since I started building Lendwill, and it is extremely difficult to build a good peer-to-peer lending platform that would allow individuals to borrow money from each other. So I can understand why there had not been any product that I wanted back in the day because it's really hard!

I mean, this is not just doing data science, but actually looking to bring together and harness really advanced analytics, modern methodologies to really bring forward business strategy on that side. And that is something specifically on the credit risk side, which I'm seeing more and more, where if you actually start at the board level thinking about why do certain things not quite work? Why why are we losing market share? Why are we not growing as fast as we can? I mean, once you actually get into the engine room, you open the door, very often you find data related topics, modelling related topics, infrastructure process topics are really at the heart of what's not working.

We're able to bring in this reliable view on the world, that growth is actually still there and very important, but I would strongly recommend not just to continue in an undifferentiated way, what you've been doing over the last 10 years, characterised by low interest, low inflation, and so on and so forth, the environment is definitely changing. We see our clients adopt to that very quickly.

But adopting to it does not mean slamming on the brakes, it actually means getting more sophisticated in the analytic space, getting more sophisticated in terms of how can I assess the affordability of a loan for a specific retail customer, for a specific SME customer on a case by case basis, in a scalable fashion. That is really where we see really a lot of interest, and a lot of movement over the last six months.

We are on the tip of the iceberg. We have no idea where this is going to end. It's endless the level of opportunities here, and it's going to need to be fueled with credit.

I think the key is to bring the approaches that have been here for millennia, but in reality, cross them also with the new technology. We don't have to have centralised banks performing all these kinds of operations or pawnshops, as we have in the past we can have this retail approach it is going to be a very interesting exploration that we are doing in other companies are going to explore the market also in bring completely marvellous solution.

So we are super excited in reality, on top of the innovation dream on top of building the next frontier for finance, it also has this deep meaning of helping people that work with different rules typically don't have access to banking. If we look into the most Western countries, this now is a niche product for very specific purpose. But in the future, we will have people on countries where this kind of solutions, help them maybe to fulfil the dreams that they have, can be life changing.